The importance of a ship in your Star Wars game

The ships in a Star Wars RPG serve a real clear purpose beside just getting your party from point A to point B. And yes, that’s a very important purpose, considering that unlike D&D, where the party marches for a few hours, and arrives at their destination, in SW a party has to cross the galaxy. And there are no teleportation spells. So yes, ships are needed.

A hunk of junk like this one is important for both you and your players to have.

But a ship also serves a very important function, to you, the SW game master, in the form of adventure hooks. When you first start running a SW game, it may seem like giving the party a ship is casual affair, and a piece of equipment like any other. It shouldn’t be. It should be the most important equipment they own, and the one that carries the most weight.

Let’s look at the Millennium Falcon as an example. Think about the story that the Falcon brings with it as far as Han Solo as a character is concerned. It’s almost like these two are intertwined, and an inseparable part of each other. Look at Han’s reaction when he gives Lando the ship to attack the Death Star with in “Return of the Jedi”, you can see the thoughts of losing the Falcon almost spinning in his head.

You as a SW game master need to capture this same bond between your scoundrel/smuggler types, and their ships. There has to be an attachment there, as the ship may be the only thing the scoundrel cares about. But before an attachment or bond occurs, the player needs to know how and when he acquired this ship. This may in fact be a huge part of the campaign, finding, buying, or stealing a ship, and it would probably make for a wonderful couple of adventures. In my game however, I’m taking the tried and true Star Wars style of En Media Res in my approach.

Meaning “into the middle of affairs”, this technique starts the story with some action already happening, rather than setting it up from the beginning. At the beginning of “A New Hope”, we enter the film with Princess Leia’s ship running from a Star Destroyer, and we missed the whole setup. That’s En Media Res.

In my game, the party will have a ship, and the backstory and complications that go along with it. I’ll accomplish this via a random table I cooked up, and I’ll let the players themselves roll on it to determine how they got the ship. In my mind, this will accomplish a few things:

It’ll make them somewhat responsible (via their roll) for the back-story of how they came to own it.

One thing I wanted to accomplish with the random table was to give the players the chance to be complicated by most groups in the SW Universe. There’s a chance for the fringe, the Empire and the Rebels to want to make the PC’s life impossible. Now, this really only applies to my particular PC’s because they are playing smuggler types with no allegiance to anybody. If your party is made up of a bunch of honorable Jedi Knights, this chart wouldn’t work. In my case though, it provides me with a hook that can carry over throughout the length of the campaign.

The point of this article isn’t to show my random table, although I will make it available for download, but rather to get you thinking about ships in the SW Universe. They shouldn’t be just another piece of gear, but rather a campaign-spanning source of adventure and intrigue.

One thing that I always have to, regardless if I’m running or playing in a Star Wars/space game, is to map out the interior. You know something’s going down at some point where it is important to know the basic layout, if not good details.

Great post, and I couldn’t agree more. This is one of the reasons the Starships of the Galaxy being so rare for Saga edition is such a crime! After the corebook, it’s my most valued asset out of all the books from the Saga line.

I did something similar with my Star Wars campaign, and gave them a junker ship that was constantly falling apart. I also began the game in media res, having their decrepit ship scooped up by the Exchange, only to be given a better one. And then, in true scoundrel fashion, they stole the prototype ship.

The only reason this is being forced is because this is the kind of game the players want to play. They want to be outlaw, smuggler types with seedy backgrounds. It fits my game, but like I said, it’s not for everyone’s table. It is for mine though.

Great post. Reading it, I couldn’t help but think about how Malcolm Reynolds thought about Serenity. “You take a boat in the air that you don’t love, she’ll shake you off sure as the turning of the worlds.” For Mal and Han, their ships were more than vessels, more than means to an end: they were family. Not sure how you build that sort of bond between players (and their characters) and an imaginary flying piece of junk, but it’s a worthy goal.

Would you be willing to post a link to ship battlemat? I’m about to start a Star Wars campaign myself and it would really be great to have something for this. By the way, is it something you made yourself or is it a premade class of ship?

I took a map off the internet of a ship, blew it up to 1″ squares in photoshop, and printed it out using Posterazor. Go to the tutorials section of the site and look at the map printing tutorial. That’s what I did.

Funny you should post this (and I saw the tweet about the battlemap you printed out) as I’m going to embark on running a new Star Wars Saga campaign in the next couple of weeks; and with fond memories of the old WEG d6 rules, I dug out my old starship maps I drew as a kid and smiled fondly at the detailed drawings 🙂 And you reminded me of the middle of the action type of opening; I’d better make sure I get that right when I start the game 🙂

For those of you interested in the ship design, the floorplan was actually created by DarthGM of the d20 Radio forums (www.d20radio.com/forum), and I believe the original image is still hosted there in the Starships and Equipment thread.

In my current Star Wars game, the players stowed away on a Titanic style luxury ship. I gave them a chance to win a ship in a card game, but instead one of the players lost all his money. He tried to get a second chance by bidding another player’s swoop bike…without his permission. He lost that too. Fortunately, the guy he was playing cards with is one of the pirates that will be taking over the ship in the next episode, so they’ll get it in the end.

My twist is going to be that the ship is the Scimitar, Darth Maul’s ship seen in Episode 1. Each episode, I’m going to have them find out another mystery about the ship that will serve as the backdrop to the adventure. It’s quite possible the player’s are going to HATE the ship when all is said and done, especially since the Emperor wants it back…